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Victor Feldbrill, foremost champion of Canadian music

Conductor to receive Sir Ernest MacMillan Memorial Award from Arts and Letters Club in Toronto three days after his 90th birthday

Canadian conductor Victor Feldbrill, a champion of Canadian music, at the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto, where his 90th birthday will be celebrated. (Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

The oldest conductor in captivity? Well, that may be a slight exaggeration, but when Toronto’s Victor Feldbrill raises his baton at the Arts and Letters Club a week Monday he will do so three days after his 90th birthday.

The birthday itself is being celebrated at the Canadian Music Centre with a presentation and performance by the Cecilia String Quartet and appropriately so, because no conductor has done more to champion the cause of Canadian music.

“It seemed only natural,” Feldbrill acknowledged this week over afternoon coffee. “When I was a student, the old conservatory (at College and University) had its cafeteria in the basement and the performance students used to sit at the same tables with the student composers. We all knew and respected each other.”

At that time, the Harbord Collegiate alumnus was studying the violin, but conducting was already in his blood.

The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he had heard his first orchestral concert while still a public school student, thanks to Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven, who had given a pair of tickets to the visiting Detroit Symphony Orchestra to Feldbrill and his friend Morey Kernerman, who would later join him in the violin section of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

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“I was impressed with everything about the concert,” Feldbrill recalls. “It opened a new world to me.”

During his violin-playing high school years he occasionally found a baton in his hands, conducting student orchestras, and he eventually worked up the courage to tell Sir Ernest MacMillan, conductor of the TSO, whom Gilbert and Sullivan would have called “ Lord High Everything Else” in Canadian music, about his ambition.

Canada’s one and only musical knight nevertheless had the teenage maestro-to-be sign up for Ettore Mazzoleni’s conducting class at the then-Toronto Conservatory of Music and, within short order, the new student found himself invited to succeed John Weinzweig as conductor of the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

When the young man was eventually called up to join the navy (this being the Second World War), Sir Ernest gave him a letter of introduction through which he met the distinguished English conductor Sir Adrian Boult, who arranged for him to study at the Royal Academy in London during his free time from violin duties with the Navy Show.

Although encouraged to stay on at the Royal Academy after the war, Feldbrill returned to his fiancée Zelda and the Toronto freelance life until an invitation came to conduct the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. The ensuing decade from 1958 on not only gave stability and growth to the Winnipeg orchestra, it gave Canada, for the first time, a symphonic ensemble with a regular commitment to Canadian music.

Feldbrill insists he has never regretted making his career in Canada. Yes, there were occasional guest engagements in England, the Soviet Union and even China, but his only major departure from the Canadian scene took place thanks to two Japanese students who worked with him in the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra, to which he returned post-Winnipeg.

As he later discovered, those students reported back to Tokyo that they had learned more from him in three months than in the previous three years at their Japanese university.

The invitation to become a short-term teacher in 1979 at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music led to a professorship and the principal conductorship of the university’s Geidai Philharmonic. Over several years, Feldbrill conducted nine of Tokyo’s 10 symphony orchestras and appeared across much of the rest of Japan.

Feldbrill admits that he misses his life in Japan and the seriousness of its orchestras (he was told, “We want you to die here”), but “I feared I was losing touch with my own country,” so he returned, conducted the Hamilton Philharmonc for awhile, resuming what ultimately became a 62-year association with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and continued his work championing Canadian music.

The work has not gone unrecognized. Now an officer of the Order of Canada and a Trillium Award winner, he will be given the Sir Ernest MacMillan Memorial Award for his work in music at the Arts and Letters Club and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Toronto Musicians Association.

His simple advice to those who would pick up his baton? “Authority comes from being prepared.”

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